002 - first question

Great! First response of the blog.  Big shot out to crawlFace3 on YouTube.  Thanks for the question.  He asks:

“Was/is there something that has always existed (so that there was never a point or condition of a true nothing of any kind) or was there actually at some point an actual nothing (where absolutely nothing existed of any kind)?”

In Response:

crawlFace3’s question is a great example of a typical product of thought, talked about in FWG, that comes about from this kind of hand-me-down western intellectual tradition’s order of successive principles within its notion of what are the First Principles of nature or in other words what are the Ultimate Causes of all reality.  To answer this question we have to address what are the principles of First Principles am I referring to, how those principles have sway over our outlook onto what we experience, and how the reordering of the First Principles can bring about an answer for crawlFace3’s question.   

Sources I am reading from are http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008IT8CNW and http://www.amazon.com/dp/0893568783.   

Imparted meaning of First Philosophy becomes clear upon reading Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics.  Aristotle list four Ultimate Causes.

1              Being / account

2              Intention of being

3              Terminus/Being’s Actualization from potential

4              Motion/Being’s potentiality

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Aristotle assumed these causes are necessary for existence to occur in a similar manner that three elements of a fire triangle need to be present for a fire to occur.  Anyway, when examining this list of ultimate causes in conjunction with the writing in his Physics and Metaphysics, one can infer that there is a hierarchy of principle among the listed.  If motion moves being along being’s intention toward being’s Actualization and then motion stops acting on being at being arrival at its actualization, then the Ultimate Causes of Being and Intention of Being must be necessary in order for potential and actual act upon.  Therefore being and intention must be superior to motion and terminus.  Intention must act upon being, thus being can be the premiere cause of the four.  Making the order of first principles as follows Being, Intention, Ends, Motion.

Imparted meaning of what it is to be First Principles is to be the most influential [of] beliefs.  The First Principle's influence is clear from these kinds of effects they have on the interpretation we have of experience.  With this order of principle an understanding of experience plays out as follows:

“Only change from subject to subject is motion…”

“How does one thing change into another [thing]?”

“The notion of an object’s potentiality, in so far as an object having an actuality, being completely independent of the subject’s view of the object.”

“You cannot make something from nothing.”

                Aristotelian First Principles are so fundamental that DNA may be a single example among few more influential than the First Principles.  crawlFace3 is essentially asking if something can come from nothing and or if something can and did come from nothing then how has it.  I’m reading it right now; Aristotle is asking the same question in his works. 

                So what are we looking at then?  crawlFace3 asks the same questions as Aristotle, substitute crawlFace3 with any western human being after Aristotle and they likely also have the same question.   What’s the common denominator between the two men?  This order of first principles is the common denominator and the culprit of why something from nothing doesn't make sense.  In all likelihood the assumption of Aristotle's order or First Principles did not originate with him.  However the belief has persisted before and beyond him, apparent upon statements above such as 'something cannot come from nothing.'
               The order of First Principles can be to blame for the uncertainty presented by crawlFace3's question because when I was too young to know any better I sought the answers to these questions.  Because I didn’t know anything about anything, I started from scratch (like Descartes but innocently) without even knowing that there was a profession that profits on the resolution of perennial questions (Philosophy).  By and by I answered what I wanted to know.  The hardest part was expressing what I had made up to someone else.  You see, language has also evolved around these First Principles (another testament to their primacy).  As time went on I read and learned more.  Once I had revolved to the left pages uncovering Aristotle, it then clicked.  I understood then why others could not make sense of my expression.   It was because others held closely Aristotelian order of First Principle was the same as what I was reading in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics.

                To answer what I wanted to know, starting from scratch of being a boy who knew nothing, Being never occurred to me as ever taking place.  Recalling back, Aristotelian being qua being necessitates Being as the original principle.  For me it was motion.  Why motion?  I knew of nothing but I knew of temperature and I knew of atoms.  Temperature cannot reach absolute zero.  Which means all things move at all times.  Stability, that which we think doesn't move, Actualization according to The Philosopher, says nothing about the object.  Actualization of an object perceived speaks only about the subject perceiving the object.  In my book FWG, I give an example of a thermostat which regulates air temperature in your home.  The thermostat turns off and shuts on the conditioner to maintain a temperature which you think is the same.  This is to say that what you see to be stable, another entity experience as turbulent.  So if I see something as stable yet another sees that same thing as not stable, then there is no Stability.  Motion is there.  Being/Stability/Actualization is not.

                So what follows is to ask your self is no being then, how being?  Clearly things, stable things surround me.  If none of these things are stable and are ever moving then they aren't really things.  If things are not things, then how is it that I experience things as things? 

                To answer this, in FWG, I ask “If you were in a pitch dark room with not sound, then how would you know if something was in the room?”  That answer is easy.  You would collide with it.  If you were walking and ran into a desk, then the desk would exist.  If you were walking and your step was not embraced by some deck, then there would be “no ground.”  When my grandmother doesn't want to see violence on TV, she covers her eyes and ears.  Sound is pressure waves; collision.  Sight is photons colliding into receptor cells in your eyes.  Stability is merely contingent upon collision.  In FWG, the word I use for collision is displacement.  So if you read FWG after this and see displacement everywhere, that is the meaning imparted.  That I can experience collision as a Stable/Actualized things while another still sees potential or nothing at all, is to say Stability of an object is a threshold of collision or collision tolerance apart of within the subject surveying the object and having nothing to do with an object.  This met threshold giving way to an experience of Actualization of an object, I call proportionality between object and subject.  In short, whatever world that exist to you is a world consisting of proportionate object.  If objects exiting to you are proportionate and some threshold of collision is Stability, then Threshold of collision is extensional with proportionality. 

                To answer your question

                                If existence is contingent on existence, then you (your biology) gives existence to things.  If you give existence to things, then things don’t exist.  If you give existence to things, then you give beginnings and endings on what is not nor ever will be beyond you.  If “any kind [of thing]” is a part of one single thing of which all things belongs and proportionality gives existence, then for that one single thing of which all things are a part of to exist some other thing would have to be proportionate to that one single thing.  If that one single thing is all things, then there can be no other thing for the one single thing to be proportionate with, hence the one single thing does not exist.  If the one single thing, of which you and all things are a part of does not exist then you don’t exist.  If you give existence to a thing, then there are no beginnings or endings.  If the one single thing can have no proportionality, then no other thing can see the one single thing as beginning or ending.   

So ever has there been non existence.  Being a part or portion of the one single thing gives you limitation.  With limitation you are allowed to collide.  In collision is there existence.  Non existence is not the opposite of existence.  To understand that you have to throw away your Principles of First Principles.   You don’t even think you have it but you do.  It’s so fundamental to your thought process that I can only suspect that it is some genic disposition like facial recognition.